Follow the Winter Meetings

Jim over at Bernie's Crew posted constantly yesterday and Duk at Big League Stew was live blogging.

I am just guessing that Day 2 will get just as much coverage...for better or worse in Duk's opinion.

Like a babbling class of ninth graders, the winter meetings have gone Twitter crazy.

From my viewpoint, this is both a very good and a very bad thing.

First, the good: At last year's meetings in Las Vegas, I'd estimate that no more than five or 10 reporters had a Twitter account (let alone understood how to harness its power for reporting). Followers weren't as plentiful either — the BLS feed probably had under 200 readers — and very few news items (if any) were born out of Tim Brown, Jon Heyman or Ken Rosenthal giving a quick forum to the lobby's loudest whispers.

Flash forward to this year. Now the thumbs of that national news trio are getting a workout and rare is the reporter who doesn't have an iPhone or Blackberry at his or her ready. For a public desperate to gain insight on their team's attempts to get better, the result is a never-ending diet of news, rumors and speculation. Fans don't even have to keep hitting refresh on their favorite team blogs to find out the latest. The complete elimination of distribution barriers is Christmas come early for the MLB Trade Rumors set.

But despite all that instant gratification, there's a hypocritical part of my info-hungry self that feels this whirring mix of puzzle pieces has drained a lot of the fun from what attracted us to the meetings in the first place.

Not to sound too crotchety here, but it used to be that reporters had an entire day before the next edition — or at least a few hours before the next blog post — to sift through all the B.S. and decide which passed muster and which didn't. The result would be a piece that would float a few possiblities that we'd be able to consume and mull over.

Now we have a conflicting wall of noise that's often hard to translate. Want to write a blog post that takes an analytical look at the pluses and minuses of a proposed deal from your local beat reporter? Want to chew it over with fellow message board posters? Better make it quick, because by the time you even write a title, there'll be 18 additional tweets that will make your item obsolete before you hit publish.

Interesting read as Day 2 dawns.